A is for: Account

Settled long ago, per the song.

I must have learned it from you from before I can remember.

I know I sang it in reverence and in service,

Wondering who holds the account,

How I’d recognize the one who’d come to collect the debt carried forward.

Yet now, as before, I sing.

To something, anything

Neither Seen nor heard;

To the possibilities inherent in useless numbers

Jotted somewhere in someone’s forgotten ledger.

Going through the papers now, pile after pile,

Cast to a fire in which I see my future self:

Only when I see the end of you do I know

What the smoke there told me,

That there might, in fact, be an end to me.

Will I still, then, hear the choral refrain?

The facts will bear the truth:

The weight of what remains,

The scope of the journey to a final home,

And who will be there at the final release.

7/20/25

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